


A Beginner's Guide to Adventuring, by Ashton Anchors

by Megan



Category: Star Ocean: The Second Story
Genre: Gen, Humor, New Game Plus Challenge, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-31
Updated: 2010-03-31
Packaged: 2017-10-08 13:33:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,058
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/76156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Megan/pseuds/Megan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Every hero has an origin story. Unfortunately, some of these stories are more heroic than others.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Beginner's Guide to Adventuring, by Ashton Anchors

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Stealth_Noodle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Stealth_Noodle/gifts).



In some parts of Lacour, there wasn't anything for an enterprising young person to do _but_ become a hero. Especially when said young person had older brothers to inherit all the property, failed at every apprenticeship he put his hand to with the notable exception of arms training (which was less a success and more a tendency for his awful luck to be worse for his opponent than it was for him combined with a knack for a minor bit of Heraldry), and caused unmitigated disaster wherever he went. Doubly so for that last one, in fact, because in the end that was what made everyone decide that Ashton's one true path in life was that of a romantic, wandering sellsword.

Emphasis on _wandering_.

Really, he couldn't blame them, especially when they were so _nice_ about it. Considering that he'd been born under an unlucky star and there really only was so much a village could take, everyone had been downright gracious about it. Quite frankly, he was a little bit surprised they had waited until he was twenty to _strongly encourage_ him on his new path, especially since there was never any shortage of heroes he could have been apprenticed to in Lacour. Just the opposite, in fact; there were so many thanks to the Tournament of Arms that he was going to have to sail for Cross just to find an adventure at all.

_You'll be fine, dear,_ his mother had said, with all the wisdom of someone raised on generations of heroic tales. _All heroes have a trial set before them by Tria-- why, with all the omens around your birth, you'll be the King of Lacour by the time you've overcome them all! And now we can have Aunt Martha over for tea again, you know she won't come around here when you're home because of that incident with the scones._

_Try Cross Castle,_ his father had advised, despite the fact he had spent his entire life as a farmer in the backwater of Lacour. _Most of the heroes they already have will have gone on to El, I expect, so they'll need someone to take care of bandits and such. Just don't tell your Aunt Martha that you're leaving, I'm hoping she doesn't figure it out and start coming over again._

His brothers had patted him on the back sort of awkwardly and said they were sure he would do well for himself, in the way they had that actually meant _there is no way on Expel you are coming out of this one alive, Ashton_. That sort of tone got used fairly often by the elder Anchors brothers.

The trip to Cross was surprisingly uneventful, unless one counted the fact that the ship was delayed due to unsafe conditions on the water. And not even Ashton could quite believe that a tidal wave hitting the entire coast of Cross was something that his bad luck had caused, especially given the fact that he wasn't there yet. Nothing caught on fire, he never fell overboard, he didn't even get particularly seasick. Ashton was, dare he even think it, rather _lucky_.

Which meant that Tria planned to yank it out from under him at the first opportunity she got, of course. And yank she did.

As it turned out, it was rather a bad time to begin a heroic career in Cross. True enough, most of their really famous adventurers and mercenaries had gone either to El or to Lacour in preparation for the Tournament of Arms-- but it seemed that people were already filling the gap. Someone in the tavern in Cross City swore up and down he saw a boy with the Sword of Light, of all things, and apparently the native son of one of the nearby farm villages had picked up a sword after bandits killed his family and gone on the sort of journey of revenge that legends came from. Not to mention the fact that a Heraldic Master had apparently discovered a new cavern in Cross Cave and the King had just personally sent a new adventuring group to El after the Sorcery Globe.

It was starting to sound like _Lacour_, with all those heroes around.

Mars had been a bust, too. Ashton hadn't been expecting much, given that it was the resting place of some of the world's greatest Heraldic secrets and all, but he went and asked around the general store and the Elder's house anyway.

"It's too bad you weren't a week earlier, dear," the Elder's wife said, and patted him on the arm. "We had some bandits, but they've all been taken care of."

Then they told him to get out of their village as quickly as possible. Very politely, of course, but there was no getting around the fact that masters of the Heraldic arts were very, very sensitive to omens and auras and everything about Ashton screamed _abandon hope, I am doom, Tria lives only to torment me and those around me_.

"You might consider visiting a temple," the Elder said before Ashton left, as if he hadn't tried _that_ one before. Honestly, well-meaning people could be the worst just because he didn't have the heart to tell them what was wrong with their advice. It would be rude.

Ashton went back to Cross proper in the end, because the port was full of heroes on their way to Lacour and Mars was full of people who were well aware of (and most uncomfortable with) the fact that Ashton Anchors had bee born under an unlucky star. They hadn't even waited for misfortune to befall him-- aside from a bookshelf falling over when he walked by, but that had looked awfully rickety when he came in-- to chase him off, which struck him as prudent but distinctly unfair.

"You know," the barkeep said as Ashton nursed his third alarmingly blue drink in two hours, "I've had some problems with giant rats in the cellar. If you can chase them off, I'll consider your tab taken care of."

Now, Ashton was both perfectly capable paying his (quite small) bar tab and rather insulted by an offer to chase off giant rats, but by that point he was desperate enough to start somewhere. It beat sitting at the bar until he ran out of money or got thrown out in the destruction that would follow someone inevitably deciding that the skinny guy at the bar drinking something brightly-colored was an easy target for a fight.

"You haven't even had an adventure yet and you're already contemplating being an alcoholic washout," Ashton said aloud as he stood surveying the cellar. "And now you're talking to yourself!"

If there were indeed giant rats in the tavern's cellar, they hid themselves awfully well. Whatever it was they kept down here in barrels, it wasn't brought upstairs very often if the dust and cobwebs were any indication. It looked like the barkeep needed a _maid_, not a mercenary (and Ashton was definitely not doing that, no matter how down on his luck he got).

Then he started sneezing from the dust. This was getting downright undignified.

"Here, gi-a-ant ra-a-at," Ashton called out between sneezes, because it couldn't hurt to try and treat a rat the size of a farm dog like a farm dog. The worst that could happen would be the rat laughed at him and stayed right where it was hiding, which was most likely what was happening anyway. And he thought he heard something that sounded rather like a rat chittering at him, amplified by about a hundred. The giant rats were _definitely_ laughing at him.

The deeper he got into the cellar, the thicker the dust got. The entire place had a gentle downward slope (which didn't seem entirely prudent to him when the place was full of barrels, but then again, maybe they wanted them to roll down if they fell over), and the air was getting cooler as he walked. How far down did this cellar _go?_ No wonder they had a giant rat problem; quite frankly, he was starting to wonder how they didn't have a bigger monster problem if they were hiding a tunnel this deep under their tavern.

"Oh, giant-- ow! Damnit!" He'd crashed right into a barrel, because the cellar also got _darker_ as he went on.

"What was that?" The answering voice definitely didn't belong to a giant rat, unless the Sorcery Globe had somehow moved itself to Cross and was currently maddening the rats in the basement of the capital's foremost adventurer's tavern. And though he was actually contemplating that possibility as he ducked behind the barrels with his cloak thrown over him to blend into the shadow behind them-- because with his luck, that could actually happen-- it was proven wrong a moment later when a man came from around the corner.

"Probably just the rats he set on us," a second man said. "Murder to catch, they are."

"Well, if he thinks rats are going to stop us then he's even stupider than I thought," the first man said. His accent was actually familiar-- Lacour, he talked like he was from Lacour. "Find the stupid thing so I can hear myself think, would you? We're going to get rid of him tonight, and I want to have a good plan when we do."

Ashton came to one terrified realization then: whether due to complete coincidence or yet another attempt on his life and sanity by the goddess Tria, he found himself in the middle of something much bigger than a rat infestation. From the sounds of it, these two were planning to do something dire to the barkeep later tonight. And evidently the barkeep knew who they were and what they were plotting, if he was the one who'd released giant rats into his own cellar to keep them busy. Were they the rats Ashton was supposed to be chasing off? Why hadn't he just come out and said he needed a bodyguard? Ashton would have still done it! He was lucky-- and he shuddered to think what might be coming to balance that out-- they hadn't come across him unawares and killed him first!

He could do this. _Deep breaths. You are a trained swordsman and you know a little bit of Heraldry and if all else fails, you can just stay here long enough they trip over their own feet and drown in barrels of really old cider, or whatever it is they keep down here._ What kind of adventurer would he be if he just hid here and let them get away with it just because the job had turned out to be a little bigger than he'd thought going in? He wouldn't be one, that's what, he'd just be a washout who'd graduated from traumatizing Aunt Martha with scone accidents to completely failing at his first and only adventure.

While he was desperately trying to talk himself into doing something, anything, the first man went back the way he'd come from and the second walked forward to find the rats. When he passed by where Ashton was hiding-- and showed no sign at all of seeing him-- Ashton struck; he reached out and grabbed the man by his ankle and _pulled_.

He went down hard, and crashed right into the barrels. Ashton managed to roll out of the way and stand up, and the man didn't follow him to his feet. A quick examination told Ashton why-- the man had hit his head on the way down, and he was out cold.

"I hope he's not too injured," Ashton murmured, because he wasn't in the business of _killing_ miscreants yet. At least, not until they did something a lot worse than talk about maybe killing someone. And hadn't they only said _get rid of_? Maybe they were bailiffs for the king and the barkeep hadn't been paying his taxes and they were trying to lawfully evict him, and Ashton was the one breaking the law! ...and that sounded ridiculous, even to him. "Don't be an idiot, Ashton, a bailiff would go in the front door, not sneak around the cellar."

With that in mind, Ashton double checked that the man he'd thrown into the barrels was not conscious but also not in any obvious danger of death (which Ashton was actually a pretty good judge of, given how many concussions he and his brothers had accumulated between them over the years) before going on to follow the second man.

"That's twice you've saved me now," Ashton said softly to the barrel he'd run into a few minutes earlier. "Well, three times, I guess, since you kept me from walking right into them." He had learned a long time ago to take luck when it was given and to be grateful for it, even if that meant thanking an inanimate object. These particular barrels were practically lucky charms for him now, comparatively.

"What are you doing out here-- _hey!_" The first man was back, and he had a sword. "Who the hell are you?"

"Why are you trying to get rid of the tavern keeper?" Ashton asked right back.

"Because he won't pay his protection money," he said, and suddenly Ashton felt a lot better about tossing that man into a pile of barrels. "Did he hire you to kill us?"

"No," Ashton said truthfully. "Just to chase you off. So, um, if you leave now and take your friend with you, we can call it even!"

"I don't think so, kid," he said. "See, our boss wouldn't like it very much if we went back and told him that some pretty-boy hick straight from the farm sent us on our way."

"_Hick?_ It's the accent, isn't it?" Ashton asked, a little ruefully. He'd recognized the gangster's accent himself, so of course the converse had been true, too.

"Sure is," he said, and drew his sword. "You should have stayed on the farm, kid."

Ashton was ready for the blow when it came, and it hit his crossed swords. The problem was that, with a start like that, he was _stuck_ on the defensive. He was so busy parrying and blocking that he didn't have a chance to get a strike in edgewise, and the first thing he was going to do if he made it out of here was buy a better set of gauntlets. And then, to make matters worse, he hit that same barrel he'd tripped over, hidden behind, and thrown the other gangster over-- it was behind him, and he crashed right into it. He closed his eyes and started whispering as fast as his lips could move as the gangster raised his sword again.

The barrel that was now between them exploded in a spray of wood shrapnel and alcohol, and Ashton danced a step backwards to avoid the worst of it. He wasn't done yet, though; while the gangster wrenched his sword up out of the remains of the barrel, Ashton reappeared behind him-- easier than the first one had been, now that he sort of had the hang of it-- and slammed the pommel of one of his swords into the man's temple. He went down without a sound.

"Thank you, Tria," Ashton said with a great, sighing exhalation of relief. He felt pretty awful that the poor barrel had been rewarded for saving him a fourth time by getting completely destroyed; he knew it was pretty irrational, but he couldn't help it. Most _people_ around Ashton weren't that helpful when he was in trouble, let alone inanimate objects. It practically felt like an old friend now, for all he'd only stumbled across it fifteen minutes earlier. He even gave it one last mournful look as he gathered up the two unconscious gangsters and began dragging them up out of the cellar.

"I didn't expect you to go straight for the _giant_ rats," the barkeep said, and didn't show a single sign of surprise when Ashton left both of them on the floor in front of his bar. "I'll send for the guards to take them away."

"You could have told me," Ashton said, and took his seat in front of the bar again.

"They keep paying my adventurers off," the barkeep said. Just Ashton's luck that they hadn't tried that on him. Not that he would have accepted it. Of course not. He would have taken that job as a maid to clean the cellar first, and he would never take _that_. "You might want to leave Cross for awhile, though. Word will get around that you beat down two of the local racket's enforcers, and you won't be able to walk two feet without running into more of them."

"Great," Ashton said, and rested his forehead in his hands. "Is this what being a hero is like, getting into more trouble when you succeed? Or is that just me?"

"I'm pretty sure that's being a hero, kid," he said. "Tell you what, though. They say there's a dragon down in the Salva Drift, south of here. It's been killing miners, and the penny-ante adventurers they've scrounged up in Salva and Arlia can't do a thing about it. I'll send word about you down to the soldiers keeping it contained down there. They could use the help."

"Really?" Ashton asked, raising his face from his hands to look at him. "You-- you think I could fight a dragon?"

A _dragon_. Dragons were supposed to be untempered agents of evil, at least according to everything he had ever heard or read. Saving the people of Salva from a dragon would earn him some good grace with Tria, right? It might even be his first step to getting rid of his curse and becoming a hero! It would definitely do more in that direction than just sitting around at a tavern in Cross and lamenting the fact he wasn't doing anything, at the very least.

"You did more to those two than most guards manage," the barkeep said with a shrug. "So yeah, I'd say you could probably handle yourself with a dragon. Just fight like you did down there, you'll be fine."

In _that_ case, Ashton was bringing a barrel with him to Salva.


End file.
